Hypervideo, or hyperlinked video, is a generic name of video content that contains embedded, user clickable anchors, allowing navigation between video and other hypermedia elements. Hypervideo is thus analogous to hypertext, a concept widely used in the World Wide Web, which allows to click on a word in one document and retrieve information from another document.
The concept dates back to the late 1980s, with its adoption being very slow. Today, with a wider availability of broadband internet and the rise of YouTube-type of services, the consumption model of video content is rapidly changing. It is expected that internet-based video distribution in the form of download or streaming will replace the traditional media distribution like DVD or TV.
As the amount of video content increases and becomes available on the Internet, the need for navigation in such content becomes more important. Hypervideo is believed to be a convenient answer that will revolutionize the consumption of video in the same way as hypertext did with textual media.
Finally, the most significant value of hypervideo is in commercial advertising. So far, devising a business model to monetize video has proven notoriously difficult. The application of traditional advertising methods used on the TV, like for example introducing ads into video, is regarded very unfavorably by the online community. Hypervideo offers an alternate way to monetize video, allowing for the possibility of creating video clips where objects link to advertising or e-commerce sites, or provide more information about particular products. This new model of advertising is less intrusive, only displaying advertising information “on demand” when the user makes the choice by clicking on an object in a video. And since it is the user who has requested the product information, this type of advertising is better targeted and likely to be more effective.